“
I had a separate meeting with Directors Montgomery and Black. We discussed terrorists infiltrating the country. As you know, there are ten scientists from the Middle East taking part in the biotechnology project. I don’t want to take any chances about one or more of them being part of a terrorist group. We don’t need this lab center and people incinerated.
”
”
Karl Braungart (Fatal Identity (Remmich/Miller, #3))
“
I have a license,” says a voice behind us. I turn to find 17C scrolling through pictures on his camera, standing in the front yard like a deep-rooted tree, like he’s been there for years. Somehow, that black eye only makes him more desirable. “And you are . . . ?” asks Moses. A) Perfect B) The god of Devastating Attractiveness C) A flawless specimen, created in a lab by mad scientists in an effort to toy with the heart of Mary Iris Malone D) All of the above I circle D. Final effing answer.
”
”
David Arnold (Mosquitoland)
“
Forgiveness, by its nature, must often go into very hard places. I know. I’ve gone there. But forgiveness is not foolish and blind, an unthinking make-nice. Wisdom sometimes must tell even people who’ve genuinely forgiven to take ongoing steps that are hard to implement and apply and which to others may not look very forgiving. The heart of forgiveness can’t be judged in black-and-white, cookie-cutter dimensions that work fine in a spiritual lab but not in real life.
”
”
Rifqa Bary (Hiding in the Light: Why I Risked Everything to Leave Islam and Follow Jesus)
“
A lady doctor in the foreground, black horn-rims and white lab coat, suddenly cried, “You people ought to be ashamed of yourselves! Do you realize what you're doing to the reality concepts we're trying to instill in these people? How do you expect them to differentiate between illusion and reality when you do something like this?”
”
”
Donald E. Westlake (The Hot Rock (Dortmunder, #1))
“
Of the seminal moments in my life, Careers Day in the autumn of Year 5 is my favorite. Everyone had to dress as whatever they wanted to be once they grew up. I had gone in a tweed jacket and a bow tie, and when Miss Weston asked me what I wanted to be, I told her that I wanted to be the Doctor.
'Shouldn't you be wearing a lab coat and stethoscope like Paul?' She pointed to Paul Black, who was trying to strangle everyone with the stethoscope in question.
Before I could answer, a boy I didn't know from the other class spoke up.
'Paul's *a* doctor,' he explained, giving me a look of approval. 'He wants to be *the* Doctor.'
'Who?'
'Exactly,' we said at the same time, relieved that she understood.
She didn't. We were sent to the quiet table to reflect on why cheeking teachers was wrong.
”
”
Non Pratt (Trouble)
“
Simi rolled back and forth and spun around on Ash’s wheeled desk chair. Dressed in a neon pink lab coat and black and white striped leggings with thigh high laced platform boots that went all the way up to her black lace miniskirt, she was adorable. Her face was mostly covered by a black surgical mask with a matching pink skull and crossbones on the right side of it. Her glowing red eyes were emphasized by her solid jet-black pigtails and dark purple eyeliner. She’d been so excited about the impending birth of the baby, that she’d been dressed that way for a month and shadowing Tory’s every step. If Tory so much as hiccuped, Simi had whipped out a black baseball glove and asked, “is it time yet? The Simi’s gots her glove all ready to catch it if it is, ’cause sometimes they come out flying.”’ – Simi
”
”
Sherrilyn Kenyon (Retribution (Dark-Hunter, #19))
“
I knew what she’d tell me. She’d say, “Something’s off about my life. I feel restless and frustrated. I have this hunch that everything was supposed to be more beautiful than this. I imagine fenceless, wide-open savannas. I want to run and hunt and kill. I want to sleep under an ink-black, silent sky filled with stars. It’s all so real I can taste it.” Then she’d look back at the cage, the only home she’s ever known. She’d look at the smiling zookeepers, the bored spectators, and her panting, bouncing, begging best friend, the Lab. She’d sigh and say, “I should be grateful. I have a good enough life here. It’s crazy to long for what doesn’t even exist.” I’d say: Tabitha. You are not crazy. You are a goddamn cheetah.
”
”
Glennon Doyle (Untamed)
“
If you need a reference point, she was created in a grandma lab somewhere by crossing the DNA of Mary Poppins, Jack Black, Julia Child and Desmond Tutu.
”
”
Scott Dannemiller
“
I was a kid once. When you meet my dad, ask him about the time my brother and I decided we wanted a yellow lab instead of a black one and spray-painted the dog.
”
”
Catherine Anderson (Silver Thaw (Mystic Creek, #1))
“
He was serious. He didn’t want her to hold him close. He didn’t want to pretend she was his mother. He didn’t want to imagine going home in her car to pet her black labs. He didn’t want to dream about sitting down to a home-cooked spaghetti dinner at her kitchen table with her family. Those things would never be his. He watched her eyes switch from hazel to green.
”
”
Debra Anastasia (Poughkeepsie (Poughkeepsie Brotherhood, #1))
“
As we strolled into the hospital, I couldn’t help thinking about Maroon 5’s “Harder to Breathe” because I was having a difficult time staying calm. I had been kidnapped and beaten senseless by an agent of Lucifer, and yet the white coats the doctors wore scared me just as badly. The men who had taken me from my mother wore those same damned lab coats. Every time I saw one, it awakened a dormant fear inside me—fear that I’d be dragged away from someone I loved again, fear that I’d be placed into the waiting hands of another horrible person. It would never truly go away.
Michael’s shoulder bumped mine, which shook me out of my thoughts. I glanced at him. “What?”
“You’re frowning.”
“Am I supposed to be smiling right now?”
He faced forward, looking at our reflection in the elevator doors. “No, but you look like you’re about to bolt at any second.”
I watched the digital numbers change one by one as we rose up to the right floor, fiddling with the rosary in the pocket of my leather jacket. Somehow, the beads had a calming effect on me. “I’m fine.”
“Hard ass.”
A tiny smirk touched my lips. “Stop thinking about my butt. You’re an archangel.”
He grinned, but didn’t reply.
”
”
Kyoko M. (The Black Parade (The Black Parade, #1))
“
Elora Laiken stood staring at it, feeling numb in body, mind, and spirit. She tried to focus on what Monq was saying as he scurried around the lab, waist long, white hair swaying in time with his agitated movements. “I’m sending you off world.
”
”
Victoria Danann (My Familiar Stranger (Knights of Black Swan, #1))
“
The haze cleared. My finger twitched, but I had not pulled the trigger. A figure stood from a crouch in the dust; he had fallen from above. He wore a black coat-thin, like a lab coat-dark trousers, black boots, and a pair of goggles over his eyes.
”
”
Brandon Sanderson (Steelheart (The Reckoners, #1))
“
Two guys are walking their dogs, one of which is a black lab and the other a Chihuahua. Passing a bar, the lab walker says, "Let's get a beer." The other guy retorts, "We can't take our dogs in there," and the first guy says, "Watch." In he goes and orders a beer. "Sorry, you can't bring your dog in here," says the bartender. "But, he's my seeing eye dog." "Oh, okay. Here's your beer." Convinced, the Chihuahua owner follows, orders a beer, and gets the same response—No beer. "But, he's my seeing eye dog," he pleads. "Yeah, right," replies the bartender. "A Chihuahua as a seeing eye dog? Gimme a break." "They gave me a Chihuahua?
”
”
Various (101 Best Jokes)
“
I hurried forward and looked into the room to my left. It was a chemistry lab with a sweeping view of the snowy terrain outside, complete with large black islands in the middle of the room, independent sinks with an eyewash and a shower in the corner, silver fixtures with gas taps to run experiments with fire—
Hrmm.
Hmmmmmmmmm.
Hehehehehe.
”
”
Robert J. Crane (Ruthless (Out of the Box, #3))
“
The prairie is notorious for the suddenness and violence of its weather changes, and that’s especially true in summer. All that grass gives off a tremendous amount of moisture. As the sun beats down, the water vapor rises until it condenses, sometimes as puffy, cotton-candy clouds, and sometimes as black thunderheads towering four miles high. Four
”
”
William M. Bass (Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales)
“
It was the very fact of the note, stuck on my windshield on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota, hundreds of miles from where Fatback had lived and, apparently, died. That, and the small deerskin pouch of tobacco that was tied to it. Fatback was a black Lab — a good dog — who had belonged to Dan, an elderly Lakota man who lived far out on the Dakota plains. Years before, as a result of a book of elders’ memories I had done with students at Red Lake, Dan had contacted me to come out to his home to speak with him. His request was vague, and I had been both skeptical and apprehensive. But, reluctantly, I had gone, and it had changed my life. We had worked together, traveled together, and created a book together in which the old man told his stories and memories and thoughts about Indian people and our American land.
”
”
Kent Nerburn (The Wolf at Twilight: An Indian Elder's Journey through a Land of Ghosts and Shadows)
“
I roll around to see Rocky hovering over me. Not in his compartment. He's in the control room!
He has slashed my restraints and pulled the chair free. He shoves it to the side.
He stands over me, wobbling. I can feel the heat radiating from his body just inches away. Smoke billows out of the radiator slits atop his carapace.
His knees buckle and he collapses on to the screen next to me, destroying it. The LCD unit blacks out and the plastic bezel melts.
I see a trail of smoke leading up the tunnel to the lab and beyond.
'Rocky!' What have you done?'
The crazy bastard must have used the large airlock in the dormitory! He came in to my partition to save me. And he'll die because of it!
He shivers and folds his legs under himself.
'Save... Earth... save... Erid...' he quavers. Then he slumps down.
'Rocky!' I grab his carapace without thinking. It's like putting my hands on a burner. I jerk away. 'Rocky... no...'
But he is motionless.
”
”
Andy Weir (Project Hail Mary)
“
Christ. Study the roster. Study everybody’s photos,” she said. “Where’s the packing list for Earl?” Et cetera, et cetera . . . That spring, the gallery was putting up Ping Xi’s first solo show—“Bowwowwow”—and Natasha was up in arms about every little detail. She probably would have fired me sooner had she not been so busy. I tried to feign interest and mask my horror whenever Natasha talked about Ping Xi’s “dog pieces.” He had taxidermied a variety of pure breeds: a poodle, a Pomeranian, a Scottish terrier. Black Lab, Dachshund. Even a little Siberian husky pup. He’d been working on them for a long time. He and Natasha had grown close since his cum paintings had sold so well. During the installation, I overheard one of the interns whispering to the electrician. “There’s a rumor going around that the artist gets the dogs as puppies, raises them, then kills them when they’re the size he wants. He locks them in an industrial freezer because that’s the most humane way to euthanize them without compromising the look of the animal. When they thaw, he can get them into whatever position he wants.
”
”
Ottessa Moshfegh (My Year of Rest and Relaxation)
“
Around town, they confused and horrified residents by doing things like dismantling a toaster with a screwdriver at the local department store to make sure the heating coil would toast the bread just so. One employee brought a pressure gauge from the lab into a store to test the suction capabilities of a vacuum cleaner model. Local car salesmen wanted to roll over and play dead when one of the Langley fellas pulled into the lot, fearing a barrage of nonsensical and unanswerable technical questions. They drove to work with books on their steering wheels. The NACA nuts always thought they had a better way to do anything—everything—and didn’t hesitate to tell the locals so.
”
”
Margot Lee Shetterly (Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race)
“
Much of the literature on creativity focuses on how to trigger these moments of innovative synthesis; how to drive the problem phase toward its resolution. And it turns out that epiphanies often happen when we are in one of two types of environment. The first is when we are switching off: having a shower, going for a walk, sipping a cold beer, daydreaming. When we are too focused, when we are thinking too literally, we can’t spot the obscure associations that are so important to creativity. We have to take a step back for the “associative state” to emerge. As the poet Julia Cameron put it: “I learned to get out of the way and let that creative force work through me.”8 The other type of environment where creative moments often happen, as we have seen, is when we are being sparked by the dissent of others. When Kevin Dunbar, a psychologist at McGill University, went to look at how scientific breakthroughs actually happen, for example (he took cameras into four molecular biology labs and recorded pretty much everything that took place), he assumed that it would involve scientists beavering away in isolated contemplation. In fact, the breakthroughs happened at lab meetings, where groups of researchers would gather around a desk to talk through their work. Why here? Because they were forced to respond to challenges and critiques from their fellow researchers. They were jarred into seeing new associations.
”
”
Matthew Syed (Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do)
“
Hard to imagine, but Dakotah herself was 99.98 percent wolf, including, you might suppose, the part of her that loved pursuing and catching things over and over at breakneck speed and delivering them back to her pack, in a faint echo of the chase. I’ve wondered if some dogs may feel a higher level of drive for such games, since it’s their only outlet for genetically programmed catch-and-kill hunting behavior. A wolf in the same situation seems more relaxed, more purely at play—certainly the case with the black wolf just then, and with other wild wolves I’ve seen. After all, wolves hunt to live, on a daily basis; fooling around with a toy is more of a break, quite separate from the serious business of living—having fun for the sheer sake of it. To high-drive Labs and border collies, fetch is often more than just a game; it’s their job, a dead serious business.
”
”
Nick Jans (A Wolf Called Romeo)
“
It was little things at first. Abby missed a phone call because she had an away game. Then one time Gretchen didn’t write back and never made up for the missing letter. They got busy with SATs and college applications, and even though they both applied to Georgetown, Gretchen didn’t get in, and Abby wound up going to George Washington anyways. At college they went to their computer labs and sent each other emails, sitting in front of black and green CRT screens and pecking them out one letter at a time. And they still wrote, but calling became a once-a-week thing. Gretchen was Abby’s maid of honor at her tiny courthouse wedding, but sometimes a month would go by and they wouldn’t speak. Then two months. Then three. They went through periods when they both made an effort to write more, but after a while that usually faded. It wasn’t anything serious, it was just life. The dance recitals, making the rent, first real jobs, pickups, dropoffs, the fights that seemed so important, the laundry, the promotions, the vacations taken, shoes bought, movies watched, lunches packed. It was a haze of the everyday that blurred the big things and made them feel distant and small.
”
”
Grady Hendrix (My Best Friend's Exorcism)
“
Confiding Julie, the first to get breasts, was cynical by Thanksgiving.
Since no one else looked like the class slut, she was given the position,
and she soon capitulated. She bleached her hair with Sun In, and started
to mess around with boys who played in garage rock bands. Marianne,
because she had long legs and a stem neck, rushed from school to her
pliés at the barre, her hair in a bun, her head held high, to arch and
sweep and bow toward the mirror until night fell. Cara delivered her
audition piece flat, but since she had a wheat-colored rope of braid that
brushed her waist, she would be Titania in the school play. Emily, bluntnosed
and loud, could outact Cara in her sleep; when she saw the cast
list she turned silently to her best friend, who handed her a box of milk
chocolate creams. Tall, strong, bony Evvy watched Elise try out her
maddening dimple. She cornered her outside class to ask her if she
thought she was cute. Elise said yes, and Evvy threw a pipette of acid,
stolen from the biology lab, in her face. Dodie hated her tight black hair
that wouldn’t grow. She crept up behind blond Karen in home ec class
and hacked out a fistful with pinking shears. Even Karen understood
that it wasn’t personal.
”
”
Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth)
“
The Memory Business Steven Sasson is a tall man with a lantern jaw. In 1973, he was a freshly minted graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His degree in electrical engineering led to a job with Kodak’s Apparatus Division research lab, where, a few months into his employment, Sasson’s supervisor, Gareth Lloyd, approached him with a “small” request. Fairchild Semiconductor had just invented the first “charge-coupled device” (or CCD)—an easy way to move an electronic charge around a transistor—and Kodak needed to know if these devices could be used for imaging.4 Could they ever. By 1975, working with a small team of talented technicians, Sasson used CCDs to create the world’s first digital still camera and digital recording device. Looking, as Fast Company once explained, “like a ’70s Polaroid crossed with a Speak-and-Spell,”5 the camera was the size of a toaster, weighed in at 8.5 pounds, had a resolution of 0.01 megapixel, and took up to thirty black-and-white digital images—a number chosen because it fell between twenty-four and thirty-six and was thus in alignment with the exposures available in Kodak’s roll film. It also stored shots on the only permanent storage device available back then—a cassette tape. Still, it was an astounding achievement and an incredible learning experience. Portrait of Steven Sasson with first digital camera, 2009 Source: Harvey Wang, From Darkroom to Daylight “When you demonstrate such a system,” Sasson later said, “that is, taking pictures without film and showing them on an electronic screen without printing them on paper, inside a company like Kodak in 1976, you have to get ready for a lot of questions. I thought people would ask me questions about the technology: How’d you do this? How’d you make that work? I didn’t get any of that. They asked me when it was going to be ready for prime time? When is it going to be realistic to use this? Why would anybody want to look at their pictures on an electronic screen?”6 In 1996, twenty years after this meeting took place, Kodak had 140,000 employees and a $28 billion market cap. They were effectively a category monopoly. In the United States, they controlled 90 percent of the film market and 85 percent of the camera market.7 But they had forgotten their business model. Kodak had started out in the chemistry and paper goods business, for sure, but they came to dominance by being in the convenience business. Even that doesn’t go far enough. There is still the question of what exactly Kodak was making more convenient. Was it just photography? Not even close. Photography was simply the medium of expression—but what was being expressed? The “Kodak Moment,” of course—our desire to document our lives, to capture the fleeting, to record the ephemeral. Kodak was in the business of recording memories. And what made recording memories more convenient than a digital camera? But that wasn’t how the Kodak Corporation of the late twentieth century saw it. They thought that the digital camera would undercut their chemical business and photographic paper business, essentially forcing the company into competing against itself. So they buried the technology. Nor did the executives understand how a low-resolution 0.01 megapixel image camera could hop on an exponential growth curve and eventually provide high-resolution images. So they ignored it. Instead of using their weighty position to corner the market, they were instead cornered by the market.
”
”
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
“
(p.112-114) This past, the Negro's past, of rope, fire torture, castration, infanticide, rape; death and humiliation; fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone; doubt that he was worthy of life, since everyone around him denied it; sorrow for this women, for his kinfolk, for his children, who needed his protection, and whom he could not protect; rage, hatred, and murder, hatred for white men so deep that it often turned against him and his own, and made all love, all trust, all joy impossible - this past, this endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, yet contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful. I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering - enough is certainly as good as a feast - but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are. That man who is forced each day to snatch manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth - and indeed, no church - can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakable. This is because, in order to save his life, he is forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted, to hear the meaning behind the words. If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it brings must be borne. And at this level of experience one's bitterness begins to be palatable, and hatred becomes too heavy a sack to carry. The apprehension of life here so briefly and inadequately sketched has been the experience of generations of Negroes, and it helps to explain how they have endured and how they have been able to produce children of kindergarten age who can walk through mobs to get to school. It demands great force and great cunning continually to assault the mighty and indifferent fortress of white supremacy, as Negroes in this country have done so long. It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate. The Negro boys and girls who are facing mobs today come out of a long line of improbable aristocrats - the only genuine aristocrats this country has produced. I say "this country" because their frame of reference was totally American. They were hewing out of the mountain of white supremacy the stone of their individuality. I have great respect for that unsung army of black men and women who trudged down back lanes and entered back doors, saying "Yes, sir" and "No, Ma'am" in order to acquire a new roof for the schoolhouse, new books, a new chemistry lab, more beds for the dormitories, more dormitories. They did not like saying "Yes, sir" and "No Ma'am", but the country was in no hurry to educate Negroes, these black men and women knew that the job had to be done, and they put their pride in their pockets in order to do it. It is very hard to believe that they were in anyway inferior to the white men and women who opened those back doors. It is very hard to believe that those men and women, raising their children, eating their greens, crying their curses, weeping their tears, singing their songs, making their love, as the sun rose, as the sun set, were in any way inferior to the white men and women who crept over to share these splendors after the sun went down. ... I am proud of these people not because of their color but because of their intelligence and their spiritual force and their beauty. The country should be proud of them, too, but, alas, not many people in this country even know of their existence.
”
”
James Baldwin
“
Henry escorted us deeper into the Foundry and before long we began encountering other employees. Some were merely odd – like the wild-haired, wild-eyed man in a white lab coat who kept telling a pop-eyed hunchback in a black cloak that his name was supposed to be pronounced "Fronk-en-steen," along with the handsome young man with curly black hair wearing a corset, fishnet stockings, 70s glam-rock boots, and far too much make-up.
”
”
Tim Waggoner (The Nekropolis Archives)
“
anybody who decided to come after the random girl out by herself late at night would find themselves at the rough end of a very enthusiastic Drool Attack, courtesy of my gorgeous black Lab and his ridiculously huge tongue.
”
”
Laurie Elisabeth Ashcroft (Spellbound (Armitage Black #1))
“
I thought of the great spectrum of The Mecca--black people from Belize, black people with Jewish mothers, black people with fathers from Bangalore, black people from Toronto and Kingston, black people who spoke Russian, who spoke Spanish, who played Mongo Santamaría, who understood mathematics and sat up in bone labs, unearthing the mysteries of the enslaved. There was more out there than I had ever hoped for, and I wanted you to have it. I wanted you to know that the world in its entirety could never be found in schools, alone, nor on the streets, alone, nor in the trophy case. I wanted you to claim the whole world, as it is. I wanted "Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus" to immediately be obvious to you.
”
”
Ta-Nehisi Coates
“
smudged with black powder. Every mirror, every painting, had been taken down from the walls. Even the benign and wise Charlie Clapper was disgusted: “The Baileys had a lot of friends and a lot of parties. We’ve got enough prints and trace to short out the crime lab. For a year.” Conklin said, “How about it, Sarge?” “Okay. We’re done.” We turned out the lights as
”
”
James Patterson (The 8th Confession (Women's Murder Club #8))
“
We asked 54 people, recruited from the Bulletproof Executive Facebook page, to conduct two batteries of cognitive function tests per day for 4 weeks while using different combinations of butter and coffee: Lab-tested Upgraded Coffee (black) Coffee made with beans from a local shop (black) Lab-tested Upgraded Coffee with butter Coffee made with beans from a local shop with butter We did not test MCTs, short-chain C8 MCTs, or coconut oil because the test was already too long and dropout (people not completing the test) was a problem. Nonetheless, the results were conclusive. With or without butter, the coffee from a local coffee shop produced statistically significant lower scores on tests of cognitive function compared to lab-tested Upgraded Coffee beans.
”
”
Dave Asprey (The Bulletproof Diet: Lose Up to a Pound a Day, Reclaim Energy and Focus, Upgrade Your Life)
“
Bernie, a giant Bernese mountain dog and Lab mix (she guessed), had a long coat, mostly black except for a streak of white starting on her forehead, then trailing down her throat and onto her chest, with another spot under her tail, making her look like a cream-filled chocolate-dipped cannoli. Three of her four paws looked dunked in white paint, like she'd made a mess during a home improvement project. She was named for one of Astra's favorite characters, Bernadette Fox from Where'd You Go, Bernadette. Like the titular character, Bernie had a small circle of people she adored; she found the rest to be annoying gnats (small children excluded--- they often had snacks to share), not to be bothered with, except the squirrel who lived in the front yard, who was her nemesis. She spent hours making sure the little rodent didn't sneak into the house.
”
”
Amy E. Reichert (Once Upon a December)
“
In 1999, a bunch of researchers published a study of about 1,600 adults examined in order to come up with equations to estimate kidney function. Just plug in the patient’s creatinine, age (because adults tend to lose muscle mass as we get older), and gender (because men tend to have more muscle mass than women), and voila!—an estimate of kidney function. Most laboratories can do this for us now. A rising creatinine level in the blood means the kidneys are not able to pee creatinine out as well as they used to, so the person’s estimated kidney function is lower. But wait—if the patient is Black, the study determined that you have to multiply by 1.2 to get a more accurate estimate. This finding was attributed to Blacks in the study having higher muscle mass than Whites and, therefore, higher amounts of creatinine in their bodies. Laboratories report the eGFR, and just below it, the eGFR if Black. Of course one of the problems with generalizations is that they aren’t always true. In medicine, in particular, they make us lazy and we often accept them without question—especially when they are in line with our underlying assumptions and beliefs. Like the belief that Black and African are inherently different from White and European at a DNA level, a belief that dates back to the days when American researchers were measuring Black-White differences in skull size to prove Black inferiority and justify slavery. But I wonder how often health-care providers make the mental adjustment that the “race adjustment” is really a proxy for muscle mass rather than just focusing on the race of the person in front of them when they are assessing lab results. I wonder if the person in front of them were a White male bodybuilder how many would tell him the race-adjusted estimate of kidney function, or a skinny Black woman the non-race-adjusted estimate. Then too I wonder how many health-care practitioners realize that equations derived from the original study of 1,600 people only included about 200 Blacks—and no American Samoans, no Hispanics, no Asians. These groups have very different body frames, but all are simply “not Black” in our equations. The implication, then, is that only Black people are different. This shortcut has the potential for a significant negative impact on Black patients who happen to not have a high muscle mass. Patients like Book of Eli. When the non-race-adjusted eGFR is 20 (when a person can be placed on the waiting list), the race-adjusted value is closer to 25. Just as the difference between eGFRs of 20 and 10 can be several years for many patients, so can the difference between 25 and 20. Years of accruing time on the kidney transplant waiting list when thirteen people on the waiting list die every day waiting for a kidney.
”
”
Vanessa Grubbs (Hundreds of Interlaced Fingers: A Kidney Doctor's Search for the Perfect Match)
“
Creation Myth
I'm the great-grandson of a sheep farmer,
child of sumacs, trash trees shedding their ancient scales.
I'm drawn from fair grass on the north end, my molecules
spat from coal and cattle, the Indiana dusk.
I'm notes scrawled on freezer paper,
the one looped oven mitt Aunt Bev crocheted
while the baby lay feverish in its crib. I rise
from a day gone thin as Cousin Ceily,
who wore her cancer wigs to church.
I come from boys unfastening in the 4-H bathroom,
the stink of urinal cakes, dirty hands that scratched an itch.
I breathe in arc welders and air compressors.
I breathe out milk leaking from nurse cows,
Uncle Jake's spoiled old bitches. I'm run through
with moths and meth labs, a child of the KKK,
men who lynched Tom Shipp from a split
oak in Marion, August 1930. My cells
carry his shadow swaying over uncut grass.
They carry my second third cousin
cheering in the back. I rise from aphids
in honeysuckle, egg yolks flecked with blood.
Born one humid summer night, my body hums
like a black cricket, transmitting August
across the fields. I sing till my throat bleeds. I smoke
like a pan of scorched sugar. I'll never forget
the miracle of firecrackers, freezer meat, murky
gray lemonade. I'm born to thunder
in the veins, a child of form, a rusted gasket ring, some
disenchanted thing, the promise of a worm.
”
”
Bruce Snider (Fruit (Volume 1) (Wisconsin Poetry Series))
“
What qualities are essentials for this type of dog? It takes focus, endurance, an ability to scent discriminate, and, some would say excessive drive. For me, Black Labs of working/field trail lines have proven to be very capable in this role. However, I know that many breeds of dogs would work just as well. It takes a dog that is tireless, with a boundless desire to please. The dog must be tough enough for the weather and terrain and just dumb enough to want to do this more than anything else in the world. – Deb Tirmenstein
”
”
Susan Bulanda (Ready to Serve, Ready to Save: Strategies of Real-Life Search and Rescue Missions)
“
An experimental physics lab is probably unlike any other room you’ve been in before. The lighting is harsh, of course, aggressively bright and beyond the reach of aesthetic concerns. There are sounds of machines, a harmonic hum, sometimes just from fans on computer equipment as opposed to any motorized parts. There’s never any bespoke sound absorbers, so the machines have a sonic clarity that seems intentional, cranked up for some postindustrial experimental orchestra.
”
”
Janna Levin (Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space)
“
Liam had never once indicated he felt anything more than brotherly affection for her. She was still the nerdy geek who'd spent lunches in the science lab, and Liam was still the guy who'd dated the most beautiful girls in the school. Daisy had watched them from the window when he came to pick up Sanjay, and wondered how it felt to be so thin you could disappear between two blades of grass, and what they would do when faced with a summer of desi weddings where you had to starve yourself at the beginning of the week so you could eat for three straight days.
Not that she wasn't attractive---she was comfortable with her body, right down to the chipped front tooth that had come from taking a line drive to the face on the baseball diamond---but she and Liam were from two different worlds. Except for their childhood wounds, they shared nothing but memories, a love for video games, and good taste in black leather boots.
”
”
Sara Desai (The Dating Plan (Marriage Game, #2))
“
We sin when we violate the relationship between us and God, between us and others. To lie, cheat, or steal is sin because it violates the relationship between you and your neighbor. We sin against God when we deny that we are our brother’s keeper, when we ignore the interrelatedness between us.
”
”
Andrew Root (The Grace of Dogs: A Boy, a Black Lab, and a Father's Search for the Canine Soul)
“
his five-decade dictatorial control of the FBI to transform the agency into a vehicle for shielding organized crime, fortifying his corrupt political partners, oppressing Black Americans, surveilling his political enemies, suppressing free speech and dissent, and as a platform for building a cult of personality around his own inflated ego. More recently, Dr. Fauci’s perennial biographer, Charles Ortleb, analogized Dr. Fauci’s career and pathological mendacity to the sociopathic con men Bernie Madoff and Charles Ponzi.37 Another critic, author J. B. Handley, labeled Dr. Fauci “a snake oil salesman” and a “bigger medical charlatan than Rasputin.”38 Economist and author Peter Navarro, former Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, observed during a national network television interview in April 2021 that “Fauci is a sociopath and a liar.”39 His white lab coat, his official title, and his groaning bookshelves crowded with awards from his medical cartel collaborators allow Dr. Fauci to masquerade as a neutral, disinterested scientist and selfless public servant driven by a relentless commitment to public health. But Dr. Fauci doesn’t really do public health. By every metric, his fifty-year regime has been a catastrophe for American health. But as a businessman, his success has been boundless. In 2010, Dr. Fauci told adoring New Yorker writer Michael Specter that his go-to political playbook is Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather.40 He spontaneously recited his favorite line from Puzo’s epic: “It’s nothing personal, it’s strictly business.
”
”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
“
A man in a white lab coat appeared in the doorway, and when he saw me, he smiled. Ty Feld was two inches shorter than me, with curly, grizzled black hair, bushy sideburns, and a mustache more befitting a saloon owner. The GPA had kept Feld in its sights for years. We’d never gone after him, even though we knew he lived in the penthouse of Tower of Babel and operated out of a handful of old buildings in the abandoned sprawl of Las Vegas. Officially, we’d never been told why he was off-limits, but we all knew. He was a back-alley contractor for DARPA. He sold them illicit biotech and occasionally coughed up legit intel on bioterrorists and competitors to the GPA. So all things being equal, he was allowed to run his business of exotic synthetic creatures as long as he justified the freedom he was allowed.
”
”
Blake Crouch (Upgrade)
“
Shutting out the noise of the world And its violence I learn to listen In the silence Between the words Between the heartbeats For all that is unsaid I learn to hear the pleas of others When they do not know the lingo I learn to read their expressions See their almost-hidden pain Interpret body language and movement To comprehend what the body seeks to teach me There in the silence In the cadaver lab I learn to translate and transmute all of these little “nothings” Into relief for others There in the silence I learn my job My profession My definition My job is to listen
”
”
Martina McGowan (I Am the Rage)
“
While a 'cure' for HIV would, in effect, decrease Gilead's market share, PrEP not only allows for the capture of those who are HIV+ but has transformed all those who are not into consumers - market saturation as a way of life.
Because of PrEP's prohibitive cost, many of those most impacted by HIV, namely young Black, Indigenous, and/or Latinx trans women and MSM as well as IV drug users, have limited, if any, access. The ongoing legacies of colonial medical disinformation swirls with transphobic epidemiology and the homicidal stigmatization of IV drug use that results in the uninterruption of the pandemic for some, while the end of AIDS is habitually proclaimed for others. In a lethal irony, it is the logic of the patent - the argument that innovation is only spurred by the security of private property - that replicates the virus and its differential death. Put plainly, the HIV cells of those taken without their informed consent or compensation, housed in the NIH reagent bank and also laboring in publicly funded labs that produced PrEP, are withheld from the same populations, and perhaps the same people from whom they were initially extracted. The theft of their viral labor helped grow Gilead's incalculable wealth, which includes $36.2 billion in earnings off Truvada alone.
”
”
Eric A. Stanley (Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable)
“
Morgan noticed that the dog was off leash and way ahead of the guy, and she instinctively tensed up as it ran toward where they were standing. Bernadette kept her eye on the dog as well, but Palmer was oblivious, sniffing something invisible in the sand.
As the dog got closer, Morgan saw that he was carrying a piece of driftwood like it was a trophy, head up at an awkward angle to compensate for the weight of it. It was a beautiful black Lab, its coat wet with salt water. She relaxed when she realized that the dog hadn’t even noticed they were there, so focused on the joy of kicking up sand that nothing else mattered. It was the essence of dog happiness distilled to a moment, and Morgan’s heart pinched when she realized it was a pleasure that Hudson couldn’t experience.
Yet. Someday he’s going to be able to race down the beach with wet fur and a smile on his face, carrying a piece of driftwood with a buddy like they’re running a relay race.
”
”
Victoria Schade (Dog Friendly)
“
The journalist Dan Lyons joined a tech start-up after being downsized from Newsweek in 2012, and the experience inspired him to write a book about how Bay Area norms have infected the American workplace, Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us. Nominally egalitarian but oppressive in practice, the start-up spirit insists that everyone be super psyched about their jobs all the time. No one is actually loyal to the organziation in the sense of intending to work there for longer than five years, but what employees lack in commitment, they must make up for in enthusiasm. This mandatory passion is made worse by the smartphone. No one is every off duty anymore. The BlackBerry’s original tagline was “Always On. Always Connected.” Bizarrely, this made people want to buy it.
”
”
Helen Andrews (Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster)
“
Another weird thing was that after a flight the windshields often were pitted with tiny black dots, like burn specks. We couldn’t figure out what in hell it was. We had the specks lab tested, and they turned out to be organic material—insects that had been injected into the stratosphere and were circling in orbit around the earth with dust and debris at seventy-five thousand feet in the jet stream. How in hell did they get lifted up there? We finally figured it out: they were hoisted aloft from the atomic test explosions in Russia and China.
”
”
Ben R. Rich (Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed)
“
In 1968,” he continued, “Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich echoed Malthus in many ways in a wildly influential book entitled The Population Bomb, again predicting an inevitable disaster that never came. He later declared with conviction that four billion people worldwide, and sixty-five million Americans, would die of starvation by the year 1990. “In the seventies, many scientists became convinced that the globe was cooling, and raised alarms that a new ice age was just around the corner.” Elias shook his head. “I could provide endless examples of other coming disasters and doomsday scenarios that evoked widespread anxiety, but that were grossly exaggerated. Acid rain and low sperm counts. Y2K, AIDS, Ebola, mad-cow disease, and killer bees. The bird flu and the reversal of Earth’s magnetic poles. Severe shortages of everything under the sun, from oil, to food, to zinc. Black holes created by the Large Hadron Collider, and unstoppable genetically engineered organisms breaking free of the lab. Famine, nuclear war, and asteroid collisions. Oh, yeah, and predictions of the near extinction of all species on Earth, which was supposed to have already occurred. And on and on and on. Esteemed scientists or government experts convinced us to fear all of these coming catastrophes. Most never happened at all. Those that did wreaked only a tiny fraction of the havoc that we were assured was coming.
”
”
Douglas E. Richards (Veracity)
“
At the 1988 American Heart Association conference, a Black hypertension researcher said African Americans had higher hypertension rates because only those able to retain high levels of salt survived consuming the salt water of the Atlantic Ocean during the Middle Passage. “I’ve bounced this off a number of colleagues and…it seems certainly plausible,” Clarence Grim told swooning reporters. Plausibility became proof, and the slavery/hypertension thesis received the red carpet in the cardiovascular community in the 1990s. Grim did not arrive at the thesis in his research lab. It came to him as he read Roots by Alex Haley. Who needs scientific proof when a biological racial distinction can be imagined by reading fiction? By reading the Bible? —
”
”
Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist)
“
I once knew someone in New York who insisted that his black Lab was a vegetarian. “Just like you,” I said. “Gosh, what a coincidence!
”
”
David Sedaris (Calypso)
“
I spend most of my Mondays with blood. I am a hematologist by training. I study blood and treat blood diseases, including cancers and precancers of white blood cells. On Monday, I arrive much earlier than my patients, when the morning light is still aslant across the black slate of the lab benches. I close the shutters and peer through the microscope at blood smears. A droplet of blood has been spread across a glass slide, to make a film of single cells, each stained with special dyes. The slides are like previews of books, or movie trailers. The cells will begin to reveal the stories of the patients even before I see them in person. I sit by the microscope in the darkened room, a notepad by my side, and whisper to myself as I go through the slides. It’s an old habit; a passerby might well consider me unhinged. Each time I examine a slide, I mumble out the method that my hematology professor in medical school, a tall man with a perpetually leaking pen in his pocket, taught me: “Divide the main cellular components of blood. Red cell. White cell. Platelet. Examine each cell type separately. Write what you observe about each type. Move methodically. Number, color, morphology, shape, size.” It is, by far, the favorite time of my day at work. Number, color, morphology, shape, size. I move methodically. I love looking at cells, in the way that a gardener loves looking at plants—not just the whole but also the parts within the parts: the leaves, the fronds, the precise smell of loam around a fern, the way the woodpecker has bored into the high branches of a tree. Blood speaks to me—but only if I pay attention.
”
”
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human)
“
Citizen Lab, which tracks state-backed efforts to hack and surveil journalists, had recently reported that NSO Group’s Pegasus software compromised an iPhone belonging to a friend of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, not long before Saudi operatives cut Khashoggi to pieces with a bone saw. The investigation had prompted sharp criticism of NSO Group, which denied that its software was used to target Khashoggi but also refused to answer questions about whether the software had been sold to the Saudi government. Lambert wanted to know about Citizen Lab’s work on NSO Group. He asked whether there was any “racist element” to the focus on an Israeli group. He pressed Scott-Railton about his views on the Holocaust. As they spoke, Lambert took out a black pen with a silver clip and a chrome ring on its barrel. He laid it just so on a legal pad in front of him, tip pointed at Scott-Railton.
”
”
Ronan Farrow (Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators)
“
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”
”
Himalayan Pure Black Shilajit
“
Scheff described how Dr. Fauci’s NIAID and his Big Pharma partners turned Black and Hispanic foster kids into lab rats, subjecting them to torture and abuse in a grim parade of unsupervised drug and vaccine studies:
”
”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
“
With the popularity of Black Stork and the support of lawmakers, American citizens were ready to take the next step—to legislate forced sterilization. These procedures had the blessing not only of the medical and scientific communities, but also eventually of the United States Supreme Court. Eugenicists argued that the country would need to sterilize the lower 10 percent of the population and to continue to sterilize the lower 10 percent until the gene pool was pure.
”
”
Paul A. Offit (Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong)
“
Bryce was shaking. Hunt was, too. “So you went to the apartment and killed her and the Pack of Devils?” “I waited until Philip Briggs was released.” She murmured, “He had the black salt in his lab that would incriminate him.” “Yes. Once he was again on the streets, I went to Danika’s apartment—your apartment—disabled the Pack of Devils with my power, and injected her with the synth. And watched as she ripped them apart before turning on herself.” Bryce was crying in earnest now. “She didn’t tell you, though. Where the Horn was.” Micah shrugged. “She held out.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City, #1))
“
I once knew someone in New York who insisted that his black Lab was a vegetarian. “Just like you,” I said. “Gosh, what a coincidence!” When the dog charged after a hamburger someone had dropped on the sidewalk outside a McDonald’s on Eighth Avenue, he was, I guess, just going after the pickle.
”
”
David Sedaris (Calypso)
“
The first thing that came into my mind when I saw her lounging at the front of the class was the look in her catlike hazel eyes. It was the half-lidded, tight-smirked look of a woman scorned. Her glossy auburn hair was coiled in an artful French twist. Under her half-slouched lab coat, her dress was glittery black, bare-shouldered and shone in the fluorescent light like it was covered in beetles. The moment I beheld her, I knew: whoever this woman was, she was utterly and completely heartless
”
”
Serra Elinsen (Awoken (Viridian Saga, #1))
“
She blushed and we went into a small lab that looked not unlike a doctor’s office and smelled of naphtha. A black Formica counter ran along one wall with a shelf of little bottles above it and three light trays. A single steel sink was sunk into the counter, with a binocular microscope on one side of it and a large magnifying glass on a gooseneck stand on the other. Modern crime fighting at its cutting-edge finest.
”
”
Robert Crais (Indigo Slam (Elvis Cole, #7))
“
The idea of putting customers first and acting with integrity is gaining traction. Outdoor-gear retailer REI received adulation for adhering to its values when it announced that it would not only close its stores on Black Friday in 2015 but pay its employees to get outside. Contrast that with blood-test startup Theranos. CEO Elizabeth Holmes was lauded as “America’s youngest self-made billionaire,”12 and the firm was quickly valued at $9 billion. Then, testing showed that the company’s flagship Edison device, which purported to deliver test results from a single drop of blood, did not work.13 The federal government swiftly began investigating Holmes, with regulators not only revoking the company’s license to operate but suggesting a ban preventing Holmes from owning or operating a lab for two years. Walgreens Boot Alliance Inc. sued Theranos for $140 million, equivalent to the amount the drugstore giant had invested in the startup. 14 In the fall of 2016, Theranos announced it would be shutting down its blood-testing facilities and shed at least 40 percent of its workforce. 15
”
”
Brian de Haaff (Lovability: How to Build a Business That People Love and Be Happy Doing It)
“
I Don’t Care Anymore,” Hellyeah “Ballad of a Prodigal Son,” Lincoln Durham “Battleflag,” Lo Fidelity Allstars “How You Like Me Now (Raffertie Remix),” The Heavy “Black Honey,” Thrice “Bourbon Street,” Jeff Tuohy “Cellophane,” Sara Jackson-Holman “Drive,” Joe Bonamassa “Fake It,” Bastille “Heathens,” twenty one pilots “Jekyll and Hyde,” Five Finger Death Punch “Lovers End,” The Birthday Massacre “Meth Lab Zoso Sticker,” 7Horse “Bad Reputation,” Joan Jett “Peace,” Apocalyptica “Send Them Off!,” Bastille “Tainted Love,” Marilyn Manson “Take It All,” Pop Evil
”
”
Rachel Caine (Stillhouse Lake (Stillhouse Lake, #1))
“
Oh,” he said, stopping in the doorway. “I should probably warn you. Your beds might take a little getting used to.” “Why?” Tesla asked. “What’s wrong with them?” When Uncle Newt had shown them their room earlier, the beds had looked normal enough. Not that Nick and Tesla had paid much attention to them. They’d been distracted—and horrified—by the posters haphazardly stapled to the wall: Teletubbies, Elmo, Smurfs, Albert Einstein, and the periodic table. (Nick and Tesla had quickly agreed that the first three would “fall down” and “accidentally” “get ripped” at the first opportunity.) “There’s nothing wrong with your beds, and everything right!” Uncle Newt declared. “I’m telling you, kids. You haven’t slept till you’ve slept on compost!” “What?” Nick and Tesla said together. Even Uncle Newt couldn’t miss the disgust on their faces. “Maybe I’d better come up and explain,” he said. Uncle Newt pulled the comforter off Nick’s bed and revealed something that didn’t look like a bed at all. It was more like a lumpy black sleeping bag with tubes and wires poking out of one end. “Behold!” Uncle Newt said. “The biomass thermal conversion station!” Nick reluctantly gave it a test-sit. It felt like he was lowering himself onto a garbage bag stuffed with rotten old food. Because he was. “As you sleep,” Uncle Newt explained, “your body heat will help decompose food scraps pumped into the unit, which will in turn produce more heat that the convertor will turn into electricity. So, by the time you wake up in the morning, you’ll have enough power to—ta da!” Uncle Newt waved his hands at a coffeemaker sitting on the floor nearby. “Brew coffee?” Tesla said. Uncle Newt gave her a gleeful nod. “We don’t drink coffee,” said Nick. “Then you can have a hot cup of invigorating fresh-brewed water.” “Great,” Nick said. He experimented with a little bounce on his “bed.” He could feel slimy things squishing and squashing beneath his butt. “Comfy?” Uncle Newt asked. “Uhh … kind of,” Nick said. Uncle Newt beamed at his invention. “Patent pending,” he said. Uncle Newt was a gangly man with graying hair, but at that moment he looked like a five-year-old thinking about Christmas. Tesla gave the room a tentative sniff. “Shouldn’t the compost stink?” “Oh, no, no, no, no, no! Each biomass thermal conversion station is completely airtight!” Uncle Newt’s smile wavered just the teeniest bit. “In theory.” Nick opened his mouth to ask another question, but Uncle Newt didn’t seem to notice. “Well,” he said, slapping his hands together, “I guess you two should wash your teeth and brush your faces and all that. Good night!
”
”
Bob Pflugfelder (Nick and Tesla and the High-Voltage Danger Lab: A Mystery with Gadgets You Can Build Yourself ourself)
“
Algal overgrowth has killed streams, lakes, and coastal ecosystems across the Northern Hemisphere. And it’s not just the fish that are dying. The birds that eat the fish are dying, too. The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is now the size of New Jersey and is growing. Worse, more than a 150 smaller dead zones have been identified throughout the world. The Baltic Sea north of Germany is one of the most polluted marine ecosystems on the planet; in the 1990s, the Baltic cod industry collapsed. The Thames, Rhine, Meuse, and Elbe Rivers in Europe also contain more than a hundred times the amount of synthetic nitrogen that is considered safe. Similar problems are occurring in the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia, the Mediterranean and Black Seas, and China’s two largest rivers: the Huang He and Yangtze.
”
”
Paul A. Offit (Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong)
“
Where’s the pizza?” Something warm and furry came and leaned against my right leg. I reached down to pet Rocky, a black lab who was going gray around his eyes and muzzle. “Rocky wants to know where the pizza is, too.”
“He’s the reason the food is in the kitchen. Last time we kept it out here on the picnic table, he helped himself to half of a large bacon pepperoni pizza and then he threw up in my mom’s closet. She was cleaning dog barf out of her shoes for days.”
I squatted down and rubbed Rocky’s ears. “I bet you were framed, huh, buddy?” He leaned into the ear rub and sighed. “I bet it was the cat, wasn’t it?” He sighed again like he was agreeing with me.
“Nice try, but there isn’t that much barf in a cat,” Trevor said.
”
”
Chris Cannon (Boomerang Boyfriend (Boyfriend Chronicles, #3))
“
Sir, I think you’d better come with me,” the guard said, grabbing James by the elbow. James wrenched it free and demanded Aaron’s room number again. And again. And again. The guard shouted, the receptionist shouted, James shouted; the emergency room crowd took a sudden interest in the latest celebrity gossip in their magazines. “Hey!” A woman’s bark from down the hall pierced the commotion. “Whoever’s disturbing my peaceful environment of calm and healing is gonna get popped in the nose! And I just got a manicure! Now who’s causing all . . . ?” The short woman with a black beehive of hair and flushed cheeks matching her scrubs spotted James over the top of her thick, silver-rimmed glasses. Her lips pursed. “Listen, Deena,” James said, “I don’t know where you found this candy striper, but she won’t tell me where Aaron is. And I’m trying to explain to the nice big officer here that—” “Save it,” Deena said, cutting him off. Her cheeks faded to the same color white as her lab coat. “They’re back here.” She flicked her head down the hall and held up a hand to the guard. “He’s fine, Trevor; I got him.” “You sure?” The guard inflated, ready to pounce if the head ER nurse gave the order. “Yes, I’m sure. But I’ll call you if there’s a problem.” Deena raised one black eyebrow and scowled at James as he approached. “Won’t I, Mr. McConnell?” His plastic cleats left a trail of baseball field dirt for the guard to follow. He was in no mood for a reprimand. “Just tell me where he is.
”
”
Jake Smith (Wish)
“
There is no better medicine than the unconditional love of a black lab.
”
”
Jennifer Pharr Davis (Becoming Odyssa : Adventures on the Appalachian Trail)
“
Though the government had the opportunity to establish the Reservation as a completely desegregated zone, it did not; black residents on the grounds of the Clinton Engineer Works would be primarily laborers, janitors, and domestics, and would live separately, no matter their education or background. This would prevent noted mathematician, physicist, and engineer J. Ernest Wilkins Jr., who was working at the Metallurgical Lab at the University of Chicago, from being transferred to Oak Ridge.
”
”
Denise Kiernan (The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II)
“
Inside, Tim saw a small room bathed in green light. Four technicians in lab coats were peering into double-barreled stereo microscopes, or looking at images on high resolution video screens. The room was filled with yellow stones. The stones were in glass shelves; in cardboard boxes; in large pull-out trays. Each stone was tagged and numbered in black ink.
”
”
Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park (Jurassic Park, #1))
“
For me poetry is not the exclusive domain of academia. Stuff to be studied and dissected in college classrooms like a lab rat to find out what makes it thick. It is a form of human expression. The transference of human emotion from one person to another whether it is written or performed.
”
”
Valentine Okolo (I Will Be Silent)
“
In the few weeks we've been in residence, Schatzi has kicked dirt in the eye of a Chihuahua, resulting in a squealing of eardrum-perforating shrillness. She nipped the fingers of a very nice young woman walking her terrier mix when she tried to pet her. She growled at a Yorkie so menacingly the dog had immediate violently explosive diarrhea. All over my leg. It was like some invisible hand just squeezed her in the middle and hot liquid poop shot out of her with such velocity that despite being only like eight inches tall, she hit me from ankle to over the knee. I'm still grateful she wasn't a bigger dog.
Schatzi was never mean to other dogs, or owners for that matter, when we were in the West Loop. She had her neighborhood pals, Otto the black Lab, who always tried to give her gifts of mangy tennis balls, Lucy, the sweet old arthritic collie who would nuzzle Schatzi like a doting grandmother, and her best buddy, Klaus, a giant schnauzer, the perfect replica of Schatzi herself, just supersized. They would romp around and then put their square bearded heads together and have what appeared to be very serious conversations about things. Jimmy, Klaus's dad, would always lean over and ask, "Do you think they're planning to invade Poland?" which never failed to make me laugh.
”
”
Stacey Ballis (Recipe for Disaster)
“
Readers of these pages will learn how in exalting patented medicine Dr. Fauci has, throughout his long career, routinely falsified science, deceived the public and physicians, and lied about safety and efficacy. Dr. Fauci’s malefactions detailed in this volume include his crimes against the hundreds of Black and Hispanic orphan and foster children whom he subjected to cruel and deadly medical experiments and his role, with Bill Gates, in transforming hundreds of thousands of Africans into lab rats for low-cost clinical trials of dangerous experimental drugs that, once approved, remain financially out of reach for most Africans. You will learn how Dr. Fauci and Mr. Gates have turned the African continent into a dumping ground for expired, dangerous, and ineffective drugs, many of them discontinued for safety reasons in the US and Europe.
”
”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
“
I’m twenty-seven years old. I’ve worked all morning at the lab, and things are going so well I almost shrug off the party. I’ve been doing that a lot lately—neglecting friends and social engagements to steal just a few more hours in the cleanroom. I first notice you in the far corner of the small backyard as I stand on the deck, sipping a Corona-and-lime, my thoughts still back at the lab. I think it’s the way you’re standing that catches my attention—boxed in by a tall, lanky guy in tight black jeans who I recognize from this circle of friends. He’s an artist or something. I don’t even know his name, only that my friend Kyle has said to me recently, Oh, that guy fucks everyone. I can’t explain it, even to this day, but as I watch him chatting up this dark-haired, dark-eyed woman in a cobalt-blue dress—you—a flash of jealousy consumes me. Inexplicably, insanely, I want to hit him. Something in your body language suggests discomfort. You aren’t smiling, your arms are crossed, and it occurs to me that you’re trapped in a bad conversation, and that for some reason, I care. You hold an empty wineglass, streaked with the dregs of a red. Part of me urges, Go talk to her, save her. The other half screams, You know nothing about this woman, not even her name. You are not that guy. I find myself moving toward you through the grass, carrying a new glass of wine, and when your eyes avert to mine, it feels like some piece of machinery has just seized in my chest. Like worlds colliding. As I draw near, you take the glass out of my hand as if you had previously sent me off to get it and smile with an easy familiarity, like we’ve known each other forever. You try to introduce me to Dillon, but the skinny-jeaned artist, now effectively cockblocked, makes his excuses and bails. Then it’s just the two of us standing in the shade of the hedgerow, and my heart is going like mad. I say, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but it looked like you might need rescuing,” and you say, “Good instincts. He’s pretty, but insufferable.” I introduce myself. You tell me your name. Daniela. Daniela.
”
”
Blake Crouch (Dark Matter)
“
black lab and the other a Chihuahua. Passing a bar, the lab walker says, "Let's get a beer." The other guy retorts, "We can't take our dogs in there," and the first guy says, "Watch." In he goes and orders a beer. "Sorry, you can't bring your dog in here," says the bartender.
”
”
Various (101 Best Jokes)
“
Charles Davenport, who in a letter to Grant urged him to push forward on immigration restriction: “Can we build a wall high enough around this country so as to keep out these cheaper races; or will it be a feeble dam, leaving it to our descendants to abandon the country to blacks, browns, and yellows.” A hundred years later, Donald Trump said, “People are pouring across our borders, which is horrible. We have to build a wall. I build some of the greatest buildings in the world. Building a wall for me is easy. And it would be a wall. It would be a real wall. Not a wall that people walk over.
”
”
Paul A. Offit (Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong)
“
have striking memories of the first microbiology class I took. The instructor asked me and my classmates to place our hands on the agar gel in petri dishes that had been placed on our lab benches. A week later we returned to the lab to find our petri dishes contained gnarly black, yellow, white, and green furry monstrosities growing in the precise shape of our hands. That petri dish was easily the most vivid demonstration of the importance of hand washing I’ve ever seen. We
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Jayson Lusk (Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology Are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World)
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Under the circle I write a long code in black pen that designates the year, the media batch, the parent tree, and the seed lot. I don’t write my initials because we all learned each other’s handwriting long ago, just as I can recognize the handwriting of each dead Norwegian forester whom I have never met.
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Hope Jahren (Lab Girl)
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Maybe ," Kate replied, "but sometimes I worry about what we're doing. I know in my heart it's right to save these endangered species; I just wish we didn't need to do it from behind walls."
" I know," Alice sighed. "There's so much we humans have to learn. For starters, we have to stop taking habitat that doesn't belong to us. The animals could then reproduce and live healthy lives where they belong.
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Karen Rieser (Fiona Finds Her Purpose: The Story of a Black Lab, Two African Wild Dog Pups, and Their Brief Encounter)
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Jean-Claude Dehmel II was born in Vallejo, California to an All-American mother of Anglo-Irish
ancestry and a French immigrant who abandoned the family before Dehmel was out of the mother's womb. Despite great odds Mr. Dehmel went to college (Humboldt State University) where he studied Mathematics and later law school (University at Buffalo). In 2004 he moved to mainland China to take up a teaching position at Liaoning Institute of Technology in Jinzhou, China. It was there he met his wife Li Xiao Bai. The marriage lasted three years. Mr. Dehmel has no children. He is the happy owner of a Pit Bull/Black lab mix. He has been a licensed attorney in Connecticut since 2009 but has little to no interest in practicing law.
He is the author of three other books: Poetry for the Lovelorn, Notes from an American Jail and
The House that Vivian Built
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Jean-Claude Dehmel II (Notes from an American Jail: One attorney's 60 days in the New Haven County Jail)
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But there is a lot of fuzziness in the notion of "intellectual contribution." In some academic units, for example, junior scholars are expected to list their department chairs or lab chiefs as coauthors on all their publications, whether or not these people have actually contributed anything to the paper. In fact, I have heard some senior academics argue that they should be listed as coauthors on anything written by anyone being paid out of their grants. The polite term for this is honorary authorship or gift authorship, a practice that is officially frowned upon by journal editors but that remains relatively common.
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Carl Elliott (White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine)
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By mid-2009, integration had been officially attempted in only two of the state’s 33 prisons, beginning with non-violent inmates considered most likely to accept it. At Sierra Conservation Center, southeast of Sacramento, integration began in the fall of 2008. For three days, hundreds of prisoners protested by refusing to work, eat, or leave their cells. Rules violations increased five-fold. Prisoners refused to share cells even though they could be punished with withdrawal of television, commissary, and exercise privileges, and have up to 90 days added to their sentences.
'To me, this is like using us like lab rats, to see if it works,' said black inmate Glenn Brooks. 'It ain’t ever going to work. All it’s going to do is get somebody hurt, get somebody killed.
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Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
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Poem for Vows
Hello beautiful talented
dark semi-optimists of June,
from far off I send my hopes
Brooklyn is sunny, and the ghost
of Whitman who loved everyone
is there to see you say what
can never be said, something like
partly I promise my whole life
to try to figure out what it means
to stand facing you under a tree,
and partly no matter how angry
I get I will always remember
we met before we were born,
it was in a village, someone
had just cast a spell, it was
in the park, snow everywhere,
we were slipping and laughing,
at last we knew the green secret,
we were sea turtles swimming
a long time together without
needing to breathe, we were
two hungry owls silently
hunting night, our terrible claws,
I don’t want to sound like I know,
I’m just one who worries all night
about people in a lab watching
a storm in a glass terrarium
perform lethal ubiquity,
tiny black clouds make the final
ideogram above miniature lands
exactly resembling ours, what is
happening happens again,
they cannot stop it, they take off
their white coats, go outside,
look up and wonder, only we
who promise everything despite
everything can tell them
the solution, only we know.
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Matthew Zapruder
“
It happened in science lab on the very first day of their junior year. The chemistry teacher had handed her a beaker of some mysterious liquid and told her to carry it to her lab table. She had almost reached her seat when Jerome Hollis caught her eye and smiled. She blushed and tripped over her own feet. He plucked the beaker from her hands as she fell, then helped her stand up.
“Thanks,” she said breathlessly.
“For what?” He handed the flask back and her heart gave a little flip. He had straight black hair, hazel eyes, and black-framed glasses. He looked cute, in a nerdy-but-hip kind of way.
She tried to collect herself. “For saving me from a horrible, disfiguring scar, of course,” she said. “After all, if I had been splashed with this, um—” She gingerly held the flask aloft.
“Saline solution,” he said. “Otherwise known as salt water. You would have been fine.”
“Oh.” She put the flask down and looked away.
“Although,” he added thoughtfully, “if you had dropped the beaker, the gravitational force and speed of descent would have meant that it would have, in all probability, shattered.”
Kate glanced back at him. “The force could have sent a shard of glass into my eye, blinding me,” she suggested.
“Or cut a vein, causing a massive loss of blood. When you take all the disastrous possibilities into account—”
“You should be given a medal for heroism,” Kate finished.
“I can’t believe they’re not pinning it on my shirt right now.” He smiled, and she was lost.
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Suzanne Harper (The Juliet Club)
“
ROZ: My sister and I became guarded with each other in the weeks and months after our mother died. I don’t think either of us had a handle on what it was about, but I, in my characteristic way, was eager to roll up my sleeves and iron out some issues with her. She, less given to argument, preferred to keep her distance. Many is the time I drove through the streets of Boston presenting my case in the most cogent terms to a full courtroom just beyond the dashboard, while she was safely closeted a state away. My birthday came and went and still we had not managed to get together; of course I felt all the more put upon. Finally I had the grace to ask myself, “What’s happening here?” and I caught a glimpse of the in-between. All the energy I had been expending to shape a persuasive argument was actually propelling us apart. And I missed her—acutely. I thought that if I could just see her we surely could find some solutions. So I called her, and invited myself to her house for breakfast, and got up in the dark and was down in Connecticut by seven. There in the kitchen in her nightgown I found her, looking like my favorite sister in all the world. We talked gaily while we drank black Italian coffee, and then we took a long morning walk down the leafy dirt roads of Ashford, Connecticut, while her chocolate Lab, Chloe, ran ahead and came back, ran ahead and came back, in long arcs of perpetual motion. What did we talk about? The architecture, and the countryside, and the cats that Chloe was eager to visit at the farm ahead. We revisited scenes featuring our hilarious mother. We talked about my work, and about a paper she was about to present. My “case” never came up; it must have gotten lost somewhere along that wooded road because by the time I got in the car—my courtroom, my favorable jury—it was no longer on the docket. Did we resolve the issues? Obviously not, but the issues themselves are rarely what they seem, no matter what pains are taken to verify the scoreboard. We walked together, moved our arms, became joyous in the sunlight, and breathed in the morning. At that moment there were no barriers between us. And from that place, I felt our differences could easily be spoken. My disagreements with my sister were but blips on our screen compared to the hostilities individuals and nations are capable of when anger, fear, and the sense of injustice are allowed to develop unchecked. “Putting things aside” then becomes quite a different matter. At the apex of desperation and rage, we need a new invention to see us through.
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Rosamund Stone Zander (The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life)
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You would think that our seminaries would be labs for this sort of cutting-edge change in thinking and doing, but my time in seminary showed something completely different. Almost every syllabus I received seemed to be a love letter written to old, dead white men. My seminary education centered whiteness over and over again, and it didn’t matter what class, what theological discipline. Professors almost unconsciously deferred to whiteness as the standard, perpetuating the racist history of the academy.
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lenny duncan (Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US)
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I just want to go kayaking in the Florida Keys, get a black lab, grow tomatoes, have a life.
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Augusten Burroughs (Dry)
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The skulls of blacks, for instance, are denser, heavier, and smoother than the skulls of whites; that’s one key reason there have been so few outstanding black Olympic swimmers: they have to work harder just to stay afloat. In
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William M. Bass (Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales)
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What is an Indian?", asked Commissioner Thomas Morgan two years after the Wounded Knee massacre. And his answer, "blood and land". He was right, but not in a way he understood. If the U.S. army and government had spent more in the ruthless elimination of the tribes, root and branch, as Sherman hoped, then strangled off their resources as Congress wanted, the "Indian problem" would have been solved. But nothing is straightforward in American history, not even ruthlessness and the nation's better angels prevented total genocide. Their hearts were right but their methods were mad. To save the Indian, they reasoned, they must kill the Indian inside. Thus began decades of social engineering rivaling the darkest visions of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. The reservation was the laboratory where new and often contradictory policies were introduced and tested much like those classic social experiments where lab rats are shocked and rewarded but always randomly. Each era had its own philosophy. Assimilation, reeducation, christianization and termination of the tribes. Yet the purpose of each was similar. Strip the Indian of his "Indian-ness", then reshape him as an idealized american, stamped and milled as if in a machine. It is easy to see why the young rebels of AIM felt such loathing for the BIA and Washington. In the parlance of the counter-culture, they saw it as "the machine". How does one survive in such a world? The machine is overwhelming and unstoppable, larger than any one woman or man. Black Elk saw it early, though he never used such dystopian terms. Perhaps the only true defense is the most intimate, preservation of one's soul. Seen that way, his life is more than just another tale of Indian vs. white, it becomes instead a parable of modern man.
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Joe Jackson
“
the screen door, Morgan began barking from down in Bud’s yard. The black lab was so loud Bunnie had to shout through her sniffles. “Don’t let Reggie bother you, Julia. He’s trying to protect me. He wants me to be happy in my new life. To fit in.” She stared toward Bud’s yard in exasperation. “That damn dog.” “Bunnie, do yourself two favors. Tell the cops about your connection to Stevie before they find it. And then take a plate of
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Barbara Ross (Boiled Over (A Maine Clambake Mystery, #2))
“
media condemnation of Michael’s arrogance amplified because he appeared not to be paying attention as he cast his eyes downward toward the defense table. “My wrists were sore from writing ‘Object Mickey! All lies,’” Michael said. During difficult testimony, Michael looked down at the photos of his son, George, and his black lab, Neeta. It was his method for keeping his PTSD symptoms at bay.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison for a Murder He Didn't Commit)
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By the time I met him, he’d had four heart attacks. He couldn’t sleep and rarely had an appetite. Almost all his teeth were gone, and those that remained were black and decaying. He was in almost constant pain; his muscles ached, and his joints were stiff. Meth’s destructiveness extended, said Jarvis, to his children, one of whom, born at the peak of his parents’ intravenous meth use, was wearing a colostomy bag by the age of ten. Unable to shoot up with the finger nubs left him by the lab explosion, Jarvis had taught himself to hold a pipe and lighter so that he could resume his meth habit once again.
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Nick Reding (Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town)
“
As whites cease to be the mainstream, their interests become less important. In 2008, the College Board, the New York-based non profit that administers Advanced Placement (AP) tests, announced it was dropping AP courses and exams in Italian, Latin literature, and French literature. Blacks and Hispanics are not interested in those subjects, and they were the groups the College Board wanted to reach.
In Berkeley, California, the governance council for the school district came up with a novel plan for bridging the racial achievement gap: eliminate all science labs, fire the five teachers who run them, and spend the money on “underperforming” students. The council explained that science labs were used mainly by white students, so they were a natural target for cuts.
Many schools have slashed enriched programs for gifted students because so few blacks and Hispanics qualify for them. Evanston Township High School in Illinois prides itself on diversity and academic excellence but, like so many others, is dismayed that the two do not always go together. In 2010 it eliminated its elite freshman honors courses in English because hardly any blacks or Hispanics met the admission criteria. The honors biology course was scheduled for elimination the next year.
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Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)